this is something bloggers & the media should be aware of when writing about personal consumption expenditures, disposable personal income, and household saving rates; essentially, more than half of those gross reported figures really only apply to 20% of the population...we really need separate reports for consumption, income, & savings rates for the rest of us....

the above is my weekly commentary that accompanied my sunday morning links mailing, which in turn was selected from my weekly blog post on the global glass onion…if you’d be interested in getting my weekly emailing of selected links that accompanies these commentaries, most coming from the aforementioned GGO posts, contact me…

the above is my weekly commentary that accompanied my sunday morning links mailing, which in turn was selected from my weekly blog post on the global glass onion…if you’d be interested in getting my weekly emailing of selected links that accompanies these commentaries, most coming from the aforementioned GGO posts, contact me…

the above is my weekly commentary that accompanied my sunday morning links mailing, which in turn was selected from my weekly blog post on the global glass onion…if you’d be interested in getting my weekly emailing of selected links that accompanies these commentaries, most coming from the aforementioned GGO posts, contact me…

this was also the week of the monthly report that has become the most interesting to me, the LPS Mortgage Monitor; i've covered it before; it quantifies delinquent mortgages & homes in foreclosure; in august, foreclosure starts were up 20% over july (you may recall reports BofA stepping up their activity in non-judicial states), although the total 2.15 million homes in the process was down 12% from last year...there were also a total of 4.25 million homeowners who had missed at least one housepayment; 2.38 million of those were less than 90 days delinquent, and 1.87 million loans were over 90 days delinquent...a total of 12.24% of mortgages were in trouble, & those in foreclosure numbered 4.11% of all mortgages...with banks in many cases unable to prove the right to foreclose, the length of time homes are in foreclosure continues to increase, with the average loan in foreclosure now having not paid on their loan for a record 611 days...

the situation in europe continues to threaten to explode into another major worldwide financial crisis that could put us into a deeper depression; i’ve got links to what i feel were the several dozen most important stories at the end of this week's blogpost, if you want to read everything on it that i've collected...

the above is my weekly commentary that accompanied my sunday morning links mailing, which in turn was selected from my weekly blog post on the global glass onion…if you’d be interested in getting my weekly emailing of selected links that accompanies these commentaries, most coming from the aforementioned GGO posts, contact me…

in somewhat of a surprise, the administration has asked the supreme court to rule on the constitutionality of the health care reform law, known as the Affordable Care Act; specifically, they are appealing a decision by a 3 judge panel in the 11th circuit court of appeals in atlanta; as far as i know, that is the only ruling that has gone against the act; there have been at least two, maybe more, rulings by other courts that the law was constitutional; although i havent followed it closely, most of the challenges to the law involve the individual mandate, which requires individuals to purchase health insurance, which i always thought was just another sop to the insurance industry (my own not well articulated position during the health care debate was for single payer, to the left of kucinich; i would have abolished the insurance companies entirely & replaced it with something akin to medicare, which is less expensive) ...that individual mandate is also what the atlanta decision related to...

i want to close with a short personal story...every week, i receive news forwarded from legitgov (http://www.legitgov.org/# breaking_news) at my yahoo mail email address - this week's package included 3 links to stories about the protests in new york known as "occupy wall street" (https://occupywallst.org) ...i had heard that yahoo mail was censoring mention of those protests but it never occurred that it might happen to me; but what i encountered when i tried to forward that package was exactly what the video in this post from thinkprogress shows: Yahoo Appears To Be Censoring Email Messages About Wall Street Protests ... i was repeatedly confronted with a captcha, which i always completed correctly, yet i was continually blocked from sending that link package with the message "Your message was not sent. Suspicious activity has been detected on your account. To protect your account and our users, your message has not been sent." i was able to send other test emails from my yahoo account without hindrance, but not the one with "occupy wall street" in it...twitter had also been censoring mention of those protests; here's the post by yves smith where that is described: Welcome to the Police State: NYC Cops Mace Peaceful Protestors Against Wall Street...so once again, i am surprised by my own naivete...i thought this only happened to protesters in iran or china, but i guess i was wrong...our whole system system is geared to protect the banks; the people, the bill of rights, & everything else is secondary... these wall street protests - which are going national - do not really fall within the purview of my blog, but i've accumulated links to a few of the stories about them that i've encountered during the week, and they're included in the miscellaneous links section at the end of my emailed links package, where i also deposit links on political & other stories that i encounter during the week that i think someone might be interested in...as i was working on this last evening, i had the live feed from the protests in the background, and as i understand it, their were 700 arrests; protesters said the police had tricked them, herding their march onto brooklyn bridge, and even escorting them partway across, only to trap them in orange police netting after they were all on the bridge...so if anyone's interested, there's gonna be a bunch of naive kids who will be needing bail money this morning...

the above is my weekly commentary that accompanied my sunday morning links mailing, which in turn was selected from my weekly blog post on the global glass onion…if you’d be interested in getting my weekly emailing of selected links that accompanies these commentaries, most coming from the aforementioned GGO posts, contact me…

note on the graphs used here

in March a year ago the St Louis Fed, home to the FRED graphs, changed their graphs to an interactive format, which apparently necessitated eliminating some of the incompatible options which we had used in creating our static graphs before then...as a result, many of the FRED graphs we've included on this website previous to that date, all of which were all created and stored at the FRED site and which we'd always hyperlinked back there, were reformatted, which in many cases changed our bar graphs to line graphs, and some cases rendered them unreadable... however, you can still click the text links we've always used in referring to them to view versions of our graphs as interactive graphs on the FRED site, or in the case where an older graph has gone missing, click on the blank space where it had been in order to view it in the new format....